BOSTON — The very rich are different from you, me and a gritty little baseball team from the Colorado Rockies.

Magic is priceless, but seldom as valuable as big-ticket talent.

Red Sox 13, Rockies 1.

“That’s not the way we drew it up,” Colorado manager Clint Hurdle said.

The Green Monster ate their mojo and spit out the Rockies on a damp Wednesday night that chilled championship dreams to the bone.

Maybe money can’t buy love, but Game 1 of the World Series was as lopsided as the disparity in team payrolls.

Boston $143 million, Colorado $54 million.

What can Hurdle do to make up the difference? Inspiration costs nothing. And shaking up his lineup to return pop to Colorado bats would be a good idea for Hurdle.

Rockies general manager Dan O’Dowd tells me the main difference between these teams’ payrolls is experience.

“They’ve been there before,” O’Dowd said, evaluating Boston on the eve of the World Series. “And, hypothetically, experience is supposed to be a difference, but it hasn’t been so far in the playoffs.”

Well, learning from your mistakes is certainly free. But it hurts.

Red Sox starting pitcher Josh Beckett is paid $6.6 million because he has been there and done that on baseball’s biggest stage.

A young lady entering Fenway Park wore a hoodie that demanded: “Bring it like Beckett.” And it blew Colorado batters away, as the ace of Boston’s staff struck out nine in seven nearly flawless innings of work.

Rockies hurler Jeff Francis, whose current $750,000 salary sits modestly at the front end of a contract that insults his considerable talent, looked like an accidental tourist, needing 103 excruciating pitches to stumble through four innings.

Boston shells out more than 30 million bucks per year to have David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez be the most wicked 1-2 punch in baseball. Worth every penny? The dynamic duo mashed the Rox with six hits and four RBIs.

“They grind pitchers up,” Beckett said.

Sure, the best-of-seven series is a long way from being over.

But this was the worst beatdown on national television for a Denver sports team since the Broncos went to Super Bowl XXIV and all they got was a lousy T-shirt, not to mention a heaping helping of humiliation served by the San Francisco 49ers.

While Manny was being Manny and Boston played bingo-bango-bongo off the famous left-field wall, did anyone else have a bad Rocky Mountain flashback to Super Joe Montana?

Hurdle, whose every decision for the month has been touched by Midas, made no moves to stop the Sox. “You don’t want to talk about the ones that worked?” he asked.

At the moment, I’d rather discuss trimming dead wood from the Colorado lineup. It starts at the top of the batting order. The Rockies stormed into the playoffs without Willy Taveras in the leadoff spot.

He again needs to take a seat on the bench.

Taveras came back from an injury-plagued summer to reclaim his job in center field and make a spectacular catch against Arizona in the National League Championship Series. But he looks lost at the plate since his return, hitting an anemic .136.

Veteran Boston pitcher Curt Schilling admires Colorado as “one of the few teams we’ve played over the last couple of years in the National League that was structured more offensively like an American League team, with a lot of people swinging the bat.”

But for the Kid Rocks to really rock and get back on a roll, they need the speed of Kazuo Matsui at the top of their order, followed by the big stick of shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, who showed signs of getting his stroke back with a run-scoring double against Beckett.

More in Sports

Broncos general manager John Elway was reminded of the nice weather, of the fun memories he had some 13 miles west in Palo Alto in college and of course the ones he experienced here in Santa Clara back in 2016.

A tangled mess at Coors Field unraveled early Thursday afternoon as rookie right-hander Jeff Hoffman craned his neck to see home run after home run leave the yard. Before the end, it devolved into a dilemma.